Newlywed Bev Marshall was following her dream when she married her high school sweetheart. She would earn her English degree in three years and find a teaching job to help send her husband to law school at Ole Miss.

After less than two months of married life, Butch, her husband, changed their plans when he signed up to be a pilot in the USAF. In less than two years' time he was headed to Vietnam. Bev was headed back home to live with her parents for the year Butch would be in Southeast Asia.

Upon his return Bev began to wonder if she could stay married to a man so changed by war. He had become a stranger in her bed. And he wondered who was this woman so changed by a year of independence, with a teaching position and a career plan of her own. But they loved each other. There was no denying they had always believed since their third date in high school they belonged together.

Thus began the roller-coaster ride of a military wife during the Vietnam years. More tours to Southeast Asia, an isolated base in Upper Michigan where bizarre events occurred as Bev struggled to adapt to a life alien to a Southern girl. Through disappointments, tragedies, and small victories, Bev found solace in the friendships formed with other wives whose stories she tells in Back Home.

When the war finally ends, there is one more battle for Bev to fight, and this one is the hardest one she must confront alone.